Notes from the Midnight Driver - Jordan Sonnenblick

Love, love, love Jordan Sonnenblick! I first read his OBOB book, Zen and the Art of Faking It, then Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pie, and now this one. I'm so happy that there's still one waiting for me, his newest book called After Ever After. His writing is just so great. He's funny and has spunky characters who are constantly making mistakes but also figuring out how to fix them, and they're dealing with tough issues, but the tough issues don't make the books total bummers. Sometimes a book gets really heavy, and that's fine, but it's also difficult sometimes to recommend a book to a middle school student that is just too deep and dark.

Jordan Sonnenblick has this knack for mixing the right amount of other stuff - good things, funny quotes, regular everyday occurrences - in to let readers get a feel for the difficulties that the character is encountering without getting mired down in it. Which is really good, because we can learn from those characters about living our own lives. Sometimes life IS hard - maybe your parents, like Alex's are splitting up. That's hard stuff to deal with. And sometimes we make bad choices, like Alex, about how to deal with that. Although hopefully you won't drive under the influence, and definitely hopefully you won't behead an innocent garden gnome. But then we have to decide where to go and how we're going to get our lives back on track. another thing this book does well is to show we're not just talking about kids when we say that, either. Grown ups sometimes need to get their lives back on track, too. It's kinda sneaky how he weaves this in, but I liked it a lot.

For Alex, there are a few someones helping him get back on track - namely the judge and his mom. But he could have been a jerk about completing his sentence at the nursing home, and he wasn't. He tried to make the best of it, and what he got back in the end was pretty amazing. I think life's a lot like that, too. When you least expect great things to happen, you're often surprised. Watch and see. I'm not saying someone will give you a guitar, though.

I highly recommend this title and any book by Jordan Sonnenblick. He rules! All three of these books are available from the WOMS library.

Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pie - Jordan Sonnenblick

It's not often that a book makes me cry and cry and also laugh out loud on the same page, but Jordan Sonnenblick did it in this awesome book, Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pie. Admittedly, it's one of the weirder names for a book I've ever read, but I thought it was terrific.

I actually had this book on my list to read for about two years, but you know how my list gets - if I were to start reading today and read without sleeping, eating, or going to the bathroom for the next three years, I probably couldn't finish my TBR stack. So anyway, I never got around to it. But then I read Zen and the Art of Faking It for the Battle of the Books, and I enjoyed it so much, I decided to move this one up on my list. That was a good idea, because I'd been missing out. Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pie is a powerful story about a boy whose baby brother gets leukemia. Not a funny thing, right? And it's not. But on the other hand, there's a lot of life, even when you or your little brother have cancer, that's pretty funny. And laughing about things is good for your blood pressure. I think it gets those little endorphin things that make our brains feel good move around or something. So we need to laugh, especially when things are hard. I really believe that, and apparently so does Jordan Sonnenblick.

Steven is in 8th grade, so you know there's a lot going on in his life already that's kind of tumultuous; adding his little brother's leukemia to the mix makes a lot of things much harder, and Steven sometimes has trouble dealing. So do his parents. so now you've got a 13 year old boy who's stressed and not very well able to cope without the people he relies on most to help him through because they can barely cope themselves. It's kind of a recipe for disaster. And there are definitely some disasters along the way. But there are a lot of good things that come out of it, too. I think this is an important thing to remember, although often hard to do, when someone gets really, really sick. Yes, it's cruddy and icky, and horrible to go through, but there are bound to be some bright spots along the way, and holding tight to those will help a lot.

I do some charity photography work with the Children's Cancer Association, and so I'm always looking for books that I think would be helpful for kids with cancer and/or their families to recommend to them. This one's going on that list.

Next up is Notes from a Midnight Driver. Jordan Sonnenblick told me (he's my Facebook friend!) it's his mom's favorite, so I can't wait to figure out why. He'd better get going on a new middle grade novel pretty soon, though, because after that, I'm out of novels by him, and I'm not going to be too happy about it!